Hello, cnc newbie here. So my question is, so I was cutting a 1" circle, 1/2" deep with a 1/8" bit. It was set at 5 passes, and at the end of cutting each pass, the tool lifted above the material 0.200 roughly. I'm using vcarve pro v11, is this something in vcarve with z1, or z2, or is this normal? I would think it would cut the circle at pass depth, then plunge too next pass depth instead of lifting above material and plunging back down. It is cutting to the correct depth. Thank you for any help. I have the Leads 1010.
It is a pocketing tool path. And I checked the simulation, starts at 1", goes down to 0.200 above, plunges and continues with each pass, I don't see that it is coming back up, but I believe it would all be in the same green line spot.
Yes, that's rather strange behaviour. You could post the file on here so we could check the code and run it on the machine and see what we get..
here is just a test hole i was doing with a pocket profile. i tried the profile toolpath and that worked perfect.
Hey Tyson, sorry I mis-read your first post. What you're describing is (if I'm reading it right) quite normal behavior for pocketing- other flavors of machines and their coding may do it differently, who knows? A profile toolpath will be different as you stated.
Yes, the Gcode is doing a retract before each layer. Search the Vectric settings for a way to prevent that. sometimes called 'stay down', 'maximum stay down' and such like. You can also reduce the safe retract height (if it is safe to do so, ie, you are not going to hit any clamps) so that it does not raise so high.
If you head over to the Vectric forum you'll see a ton of posts about this. None of the Vectric products cut pockets efficiently. There are a few workarounds that are mentioned often which are either edit the gcode or draw additional vectors that the profiling toolpath can use. I think someone even created a spiral toolpath widget that you might be able to use, but I dont have any experience with it.
It's not actually a problem, it's the way Vectric has decided to code it. Would be nice if they addressed it perhaps. But for me, its never been much of an issue.
